Hardscrabble Road (51 page)

Gregor looked out into the bullpen. The secretaries were all at work doing something at computers. He’d never understood what
happened in offices to require so much typing, not even what happened in offices where he himself worked. He wondered where
Marbury and Giametti were. Maybe they’d taken their squad car and disappeared.

“Thank you,” he said to Marla Hildebrande. “Just tell me one more thing. Whose idea was it to go looking for a replacement
for Drew Harrigan? Yours or Mr. Sheehy’s?”

“I brought it up, but he had to authorize it. I can’t authorize it on my own.”

“But you brought it up, on the twenty-seventh?”

“Absolutely.”

“Did Mr. Sheehy resist the idea?”

“No, not at all,” Marla said. “If you want to know the truth, he seemed to be relieved. We both knew we were going to have
to do something about Drew someday.”

G
regor Demarkian had graduated
from the University of Pennsylvania so long ago, he could remember when it was a matter of campuswide discussion that the
number of African Americans admitted to undergraduate study had reached a total of five. Of course, there was no discussion
at all of what happened to students like him, bright, hardworking, local, and “foreign” in spite of the fact that they’d been
born and raised in Philadelphia. The feeling at the time had been that the Gregor Demarkians of the world weren’t “really”
American, although they weren’t really “international,” either. There was respect for international students, because they
almost always came from wealthy or influential families in their home countries, and shared that vision of the world Penn
tried so hard to instill in its graduates in those days. People like Gregor Demarkian were almost always poor and almost always
“striving.” They not only worked hard, they looked like they worked hard, and that was the big no-no. Never let them see you
sweat. But it went beyond that. Never let them see you care. Never let them see you want to better yourself. If you have to
better yourself, there’s something wrong with you already.

The truth was, Gregor Demarkian got neurotic whenever he had to set foot in that part of the city that housed the University
of Pennsylvania, and there was nothing he had been able to do in all these years to change that. He distinctly remembered
a July during his third year in the Bureau when he’d done everything but shot himself in the foot not to be assigned to a
kidnapping case that had involved a business professor at the Wharton School of Finance. He didn’t follow Penn football, or
any other sport, and the only reason he contributed to the alumni fund was because he felt he had an obligation. Whatever
else Penn had given him, it had given him a first-rate education. He had gone on to the Harvard Business School as ready to
compete as any third-generation inheritor of a major merchant bank. He just couldn’t help hating the sight of the place. He
always ended up thinking of the endless bus rides he’d had to take, from school to Cavanaugh Street and back again. He wondered
if it would have been different if Cavanaugh Street had been then what it was now. He considered the possibility that if Cavanaugh
Street had been then as it was now, his parents would have had enough money to let him live away in a dormitory, and he wouldn’t
have gone to Penn at all.

Harvard probably wouldn’t have been much better, he thought, climbing out of the police car and going up the steps to the
building he knew the Math Department was in. Still. He’d checked the map, and the Math Department was still in this building.
He’d thought it was only the humanities that were stalled physically and institutionally. He wondered if Penn’s Math Department
was a good one, or a filler to stuff the vacant spaces between Physics and Chemistry. There was Jig Tyler, but you could never
tell.

Marbury and Giametti didn’t want to come in. Penn, it seemed, was deliberately intimidating to local law enforcement.

“It’s not that they don’t cooperate when they need to,” Marbury said. “If they did that, we could nail them. It’s that you
don’t want to make a mistake with one of their people.”

“You especially don’t want to make a mistake with one of their people like Jig Tyler,” Giametti said.

Gregor could actually see the point. He left them his cell phone—Rob Benedetti had called him at least six times since he’d
been to see Marla Hildebrande, and he hadn’t done anything but ride across town in a patrol car—and went in, through the front
doors, and up the stairs. It was not like last night, with Alison Standish. The building was full of people. The students
looked the way they had always looked, except that there were more “different” faces among them than there had been in his
day. There were not, however, as many “different” faces as the brochures and Web site made it appear. These days, all recruiting
materials from the Ivy League looked as if they were advertisements for the Model UN.

He knew where Jig Tyler’s office was because he had looked it up on Penn’s Web site before coming in to see Rob Benedetti
this morning. Tibor should get credit for another bit of work on the case, because without him Gregor couldn’t find anything
on the Internet. Tibor had gotten him Jig Tyler’s teaching and office hour schedule, too. He just wished he’d been able to
think of a way to get Dr. Tyler out of this building and down to a precinct station, where he wouldn’t feel as if he were
about to be stopped and questioned at any moment. Gregor had spent his entire time at Penn waiting for somebody—a security
guard, maybe—to tell him he didn’t belong there and had to go home.

Jig Tyler was sitting behind his desk behind piles of books, reading down through a page of text with his finger following
the lines. Gregor wondered if he always did that when he read, or if he was only doing it now because he knew Gregor was standing
in the doorway. You had to wonder what that was like, to have that kind of mind, to be able to do the things Jig Tyler was
able to do. Maybe it was like nothing. Maybe he experienced it as normal.

Gregor cleared his throat. He felt silly doing it. They were not only playacting with each other, they were playacting badly.
“You can put the book down,” he said. “You know I’m here. You had to know I was coming.”

Jig sat back. He had the kind of tall ranginess basketball players had, but Gregor didn’t remember hearing that he’d ever
played basketball. He took his wire-rim glasses off and put them down on the book. “I take it the nun called you,” he said.

“She came to talk to us, yes,” Gregor said. “You had to know she was going to do that.”

“Oh, yes. Do I get any points for not taking the day off and going to New York?”

“Not really. You’re smart enough to know that wouldn’t work.”

“You’d be astonished to know what kinds of stupidity smart people can
get themselves into,” Jig said. “Or maybe you wouldn’t. You graduated from Penn. I looked you up.”

“And?”

“Very impressive. I’d say very impressive especially considering your background, but I know better than that, too. Those
were the days before affirmative action and diversity goals, and you probably wouldn’t have qualified for either anyway. So,
very impressive. I liked the dual major in history and philosophy. I liked the fact that you didn’t major in literature.”

“You don’t like literature?”

“I like it fine. I don’t like literature professors.”

“You have to know by now that you delivered the poison to Drew Harrigan,” Gregor said.

Jig rubbed the sides of his face with the palms of his hands and then picked up his glasses and put them on again. “Yes, of
course I know. I knew as soon as they found the body. I suspected before that. I just wasn’t sure he was dead. Do you know
that I didn’t deliver the poison intentionally?”

“Do you mean that you didn’t think you were delivering poison?” Gregor said. “Oh, yes. You had absolutely no reason to kill
Drew Harrigan. In fact, you had a few decent reasons to want him to stay alive. What was it you thought you were doing?”

“Saving the left from itself,” Jig Tyler said. “The older I get, the more I think the distinctions are wrong. Left and right.
Conservative and liberal. It’s not that. It’s libertarian and authoritarian. It’s people who want freedom and people who want
control. Never mind. I’m not making any sense. It was his idea, by the way, all the cloak-and-dagger stuff. Pretending to
be homeless men and meeting at that monastery. His sister is the Mother Superior.”

“I know. Didn’t it occur to you to tell anybody about all of this? Come to me, if to nobody else, if you didn’t want any exposure?”

“But there’s going to be exposure, isn’t there?” Jig said. “There’s going to be no way around it. I’m going to be the only
person who is able to put our man in the right place and the right time.”

“You could have gotten yourself killed,” Gregor said. “He’s killed two people alredy. If you’ve got a cold capsule anywhere
in this office or at your house, anywhere he could get to it, I wouldn’t bet on your surviving a week.”

“I’ve been very careful to take individually wrapped caplets. I hate that word. Caplets. Why is it that multinational corporations
have to invent new words every time they produce a not all that new product?”

“Are you the one who tried to buy that property?”

“No,” Jig said. “He did. Drew blackmailed him into it, essentially. Drew pointed out, entirely legitimately, that he wouldn’t
be the only one who went to jail on prescription drug charges, if Drew wanted to start talking. And
Drew was getting, ah, a little nuts. By the time I saw him that last time, at the monastery, he was damn close to raving.
He could have passed for one of the regular schizophrenics.”

“What was he raving about?”

“The usual paranoid bullshit,” Jig said. “He was being persecuted. It was all politics. The Clintons were out to get him—”

“—The Clintons?”

“Yes, well,” Jig said. “Drew was still very obsessed with the Clintons. They’re supposed to be leading a worldwide conspiracy
of Communists and socialists to do, I don’t know what. He got lucky with the judge, or Neil Savage got smart. Bruce Williamson
would set bail for a man who gunned down a hundred babies and old ladies in front of Independence Hall at high noon if the
man was a celebrity. Still, he was out and he was in hiding. He couldn’t go any of his usual places. He was going to end up
in court no matter what else happened, and that drove him nuts. And then there was Sherman Markey, a stooge, in Drew’s words,
who only existed as a scheme to deprive him of his property. Deprive Drew of his property. If you see what I mean.”

“So he blackmailed our friend into buying the property and holding it until his legal troubles were over and he could get
it back,” Gregor said, “and he did it through Markwell Ballard because there was no way that Markwell Ballard would release
any information about the deal to anybody, even the authorities. Not bad.”

“Not bad that Markwell Ballard was available,” Jig said. “Not everybody can get an account there, and they don’t do retail
checking. Drew couldn’t get an account there.”

“Whose idea was it for you to bring the pills?”

“Drew’s, I think,” Jig said. “I didn’t know that our friend was the one who was getting him the pills until I got a call asking
me to take the little package with me when I went out to Hardscrabble Road. I don’t approve of prescriptions, did you know
that? I think we should just leave everything out over the counter and let people go to hell in their own handbaskets. So
I took the little envelope out there.”

“Did you see him die?”

“No. I didn’t even see him take the pills. I gave the package, we talked for a while—”

“—About what?”

“About Penn,” Jig said. “I think the meeting might have been a ruse to get me to deliver the drugs, but I couldn’t know that.
I went because I always went when he asked me to. I thought he’d be back, back on the air, back at the same old stand. And
I needed him.”

“You gave him the hat you were wearing.”

“Right. I’d got it from our friend, believe it or not. I take it he got it from Sherman Markey.”

“I think so,” Gregor said.

“If he knows where Sherman Markey is, Sherman Markey is dead,” Jig said.

“He doesn’t know where Sherman Markey is,” Gregor said. “I know who does, but I’m not all that interested in screaming at
somebody just yet. What about Frank Sheehy? He knew about the drugs?”

“I don’t know. But I’ll tell you what he did know about. He knew about Ellen Harrigan’s suspects list.”

“Did he?”

“Yes,” Jig said. “I talked to him, to Sheehy, maybe ten hours before I saw his picture on the news. I ran into him downtown
and started railing at him, because I thought he’d written it. I knew she hadn’t. It was the wrong list. She’d have thought
of other names. And he stopped me in the middle of ranting and told me that it hadn’t been his idea, but it was a good one
nevertheless, because it diverted suspicion from the people who were on it. Nobody took Ellen seriously. The cops wouldn’t
take Ellen seriously, either.”

“The idea was to divert suspicion to possible suspects whose names weren’t on the list?”

“I think so.”

“That almost worked,” Gregor said. “But only almost. He should never have given me the second list, the one with the names
of the people who had accounts at Markwell Ballard. It drew attention to himself, and to the fact that he was the one person
on Ellen Harrigan’s list nobody would have thought to put there. He wasn’t one of the people Drew Harrigan went after. Harrigan
went after Philadelphia Sleeps, but not Ray Dean Ballard personally. Are we going to have to subpoena you or are you going
to come down and make a statement voluntarily?”

“Oh, I’ll make a statement voluntarily,” Jig said. “There’s no reason not to, is there? No matter what anybody thinks, I’m
pretty safe here. I could get away with things nobody else on any other campus could. Two Nobels will do that for you.”

“That isn’t a small thing, two Nobels.”

“I didn’t say it was,” Jig Tyler said. “And I worked very hard to get them. Do you know what makes me the most angry about
all of this? Good old Ray Dean Ballard never worked very hard at anything, except maybe pretending he wasn’t who he was.”